The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to guard period modification in a time division duplexing (TDD) wireless system.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
Various wireless communications systems may operate using frequency division duplexing (FDD), in which paired spectrum resources may be used for concurrent uplink and downlink transmissions, or time division duplexing (TDD), in which unpaired spectrum resources may be time division multiplexed for uplink and downlink transmissions. Frame structures for FDD and TDD may be defined for a particular wireless communications system. For example, in some TDD frame structures, certain transmissions may carry uplink or downlink traffic, and a guard period may be used during a transition to switch between downlink and uplink transmissions. A guard period may be a period during which devices do not transmit, but may receive transmissions. Such a guard period may help to reduce interference where a transmitting device may begin transmission prior to a receiving device having received a different transmission (e.g., due to propagation delay of the signal transmitted to the receiving device). A guard period also may allow transmit/receive chain hardware components of a device to physically switch between transmission and receive modes.